


Three Degrees off Heartbreak

by AlreadyThere



Category: DCU (Comics)
Genre: Angst, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, It's reversed one sentence later, M/M, Medical issues, Naughty language, Referenced violence, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-04
Updated: 2019-02-04
Packaged: 2019-10-22 12:41:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 12,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17662844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlreadyThere/pseuds/AlreadyThere
Summary: Prompt from translanterncorps: boostle soulmate au! it can work for an illustration as the red string of fate, for example, or for a fic it could be what allows booster to save ted. any kind of soulmate au works nice for me, especially if there are complications due to the time travel, for example. (pre 52 or rebirth)Sometimes the love of your life has been there the whole time and you’ve just been too busy causing unnecessary internal drama via catastrophizing, escaping the trouble you knowingly caused for yourself, and ignoring your own feelings to notice.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [translanterncorps on Tumblr](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=translanterncorps+on+Tumblr).



> Besides my dirty, dirty sailor mouth, this is pretty PG-13. VERY temporary character death (it's reversed one sentence later), angst, one reference to homophobia, villainous character uses MAGA/"birther theory" talking points. Ted's heart condition plays a pretty big role in this. Which made me think I had a heart condition. Nothing in the prompt forced me to exasperate my anxiety like that, I'm just a masochist I guess.
> 
> Comic fans in Pop Culture: Um, actually in issue #56 it’s revealed that Cosmic Boy’s name came from his dead dog Cosmo, not because he travels through space on a cosmic pony as Captain Crunch suggested in issue #43
> 
> Comic fans IRL: canon??? what??? is cosmic boy even alive right now??? did he even have a dog??? wait, Geoff Johns is on cosmic boy starting next month?!? Grant Morrison’s doing another run on Captain crunch?! ah fuck it now we’ll never know what’s going on.
> 
> In that spirit, I gave up making canon work perfectly. While this is mostly a DC Rebirth story, I wanted the JLI in as well since it's not clear when Ted and Michael met in Rebirth. SO, my retcon is that the broad-strokes of the original Giffen/DeMatteis JLI run are still in place, but the the team fits into the universe closer to how it did in the 2011 JLI run - instead of the JLI existing in place of the JLA, the JLI is just a UN sponsored side project. Batman just had to leave the JLA on the weekends to lead the team or something. Other than that it’s all original JLI, none of the New 52 stuff. HiC happened up to issue 5 (this was completed late January 2019), but we’re all gonna assume the massacre was a hologram and Ivy, Solstice, Wally, Roy, and even The Protector were in the Bahamas sipping Banana daiquiris the whole time (they aren’t in this fic, I just wanted everyone to imagine it) Cool cool?
> 
> Let's get started!

"Maybe your person doesn't have a mark 'cause you don't have a brain. Like their psychic field is sending out messages and getting radio silence back. And that’s why you can’t find them."

 

Michael glared at his twin sister Michelle before returning to scrolling through a lookbook of marks on the hologram in front of him “That’s not a thing that’s ever happened.” 

 

"Maybe they're in a coma. Or  _dead,_ " she continued.

 

"Well you haven't found anyone either, have you?" Michael snapped.

 

"Yeah. 'Cause I'm eighteen and don't need to meet the person I'm going to marry before I've finished my list."

 

"You mean your trash list?" 

 

"That’s not what it is!” Michael sent her a skeptical glance.  “I mean yeah, part of it is getting all of my horrible impulses out of my system. I have to make myself classy before I meet them."

 

"Well I hope they're into necrophilia then," Michael retorted. He turned off the hologram and threw his cleats in his backpack.  "I have to go to practice. See you tonight?"

 

"Yeah. Don't do anything I wouldn't." 

 

“Not going to make promises I can’t keep ‘Shelle” 

* * *

 

Caylee always thought of the ultra smart rich-kid Ted Kord in her graduate program as stuck up or entitled, but she was pleasantly surprised to find him almost the exact opposite. Honestly, the most annoying thing about him was his tendency to be unreasonably hard on himself _\- you finished undergrad three years ago, most kids your age are barely doing that now_ \- but otherwise he was a pretty good project partner.

 

Which is why she was sure he wouldn't mind if she used his computer to troubleshoot as hers had spontaneously rebooted and she promised she'd figure out why Word wasn't tracking changes before he came back from the campus library's coffee shop. She slid over to Ted's computer and began typing into the search bar.  Before she could finish 'No Markups Word' though, Google gave her a plethora of unhelpful auto fills - 'no mark 22 bad', 'no mark means', 'no mark by 22 am I dying', 'no mark alone forever?'. They were all highlighted in purple. 

 

Caylee quickly exed out of the tab and pushed her chair back to her own computer.  Yikes. She sat perfectly still until Ted returned and tried to put it out of her head while they continued talking about the project.   _Just pretend he was researching it for class,_  she told herself. She couldn't.  Maybe she could accidentally leave proof that she had that STD lying around so that at least they'd both know something horribly embarrassing about each other.

 

"Are you okay?" Ted asked her after a few minutes. 

 

"I have chlamydia," she blurted out. 

 

"Uh, okay...do you need to go home and take something for that?"

 

"No, I, uh." Caylee sputtered.  "Let's just finish this project."

 

"Yeah," He wouldn't stop looking at her like a weirdo the rest of the night.


	2. Part 1

Ted Kord was almost 23 and still didn't have a match mark. He used to worry that something horribly wrong had happened to him. For the last year though, he began to worry something horribly wrong had happened to her.

 

His very reasonable doctor had told him that she might be much younger than him, or have a medical condition that delayed puberty and thus the simultaneous appearance of the shared mark. That plenty of 23 year olds still didn't have marks.

 

All the same, he had taken to examining every inch of his body for a dark patch of skin or a faded cluster of unformed lines and patterns.  Usually in a couple of days they would pop into a match mark once everything got sorted out between the two matches’ heads.

 

Other times it was one of the only symptoms of _premature intra-psych disengagement._ Or, as normal people called it, the person you could've been happiest with happened to die during the last stages of matching, and unless you’re one of those people with multiple marks you’re not going to get another one and you’ll never be able to find out who they were anyway.  At least if they died after your mark showed up, there was a slim chance of closure.

 

Ted tried to put her out of his mind as he prepared to sit in traffic for twenty hours. His dad sent him to Metropolis at the same time the President went to Metropolis, probably because his dad hated him and wanted him to suffer.

 

To make things worse, he couldn't get his music to play through the rental car's system and every station in the city was playing garbage. Ted sighed and turned the radio off.  _Guess I'll sit in silence.  Cause no one will ever love me._

 

Three minutes in silence on the freeway, Ted felt an itch on his back. No, not an itch. Like a dull sunburn.

 

Before he had time to think about it though, an odd feeling came over him.  Like he was going to cry - not sad tears, but not really happy ones either. Relief maybe - like he had been falling off a cliff and didn't even know it until he grabbed a branch to stop himself.

 

That wasn't quite it either.

 

The closet he could come up with was the feeling he had when his mother died. Even that wasn't right though. He didn't feel like he had been left, but that someone had returned to him after a very long time away. But - they weren't all here. Just close enough to know they were safe, but not enough to touch. That part was upsetting. It felt so close to his heart breaking that he almost took his foot off the breaks.

 

Like a wave crashing on the shore, the feeling pulled back just as the brunt of it hit. 

 

When he got to his Dad's office, he hurried into the bathroom before even meeting security. On the side of his back, somewhere below his kidneys, not as dark as it would be by the end of the day but there and present, a match mark had sprung up since he checked early that morning.  The mark looked as if it had been painted with a thick paintbrush from someone who wanted to make an impression.  It had a messy, quick, oh-crap-this-due-tomorrow sloppiness to it, like the entire thing had come together by accident. If marks weren't monochrome, this one would've been the color of tempura paints.

 

He might not fall in love with her at first sight, but when he did meet her Ted knew she'd make an impression.

 

The thought that his match was alive certainly lifted his spirits for the rest of the day. Even a full on Presidential assassination attempt couldn't get him down.

 

"Who the fuck is this bozo?" Jarvis Kord, his father's brother and business partner, asked the break room TV as the man who thwarted the shooting stood next to the President, shaking his hand and smiling at the cameras. He dressed like a NASCAR driver and talked like a Kardashian. Ted's uncle seemed to hate him more than even the assassin.

 

_"This fine young man - sorry, you said_ Booster Gold _?"_ The president asked.

 

_"Uh, I - Sure, yeah, I'm Booster Gold. Greatest hero you haven't heard of - yet."_

 

"He's Booster Gold, didn't you hear the president?"

 

"What the fuck does Buster Gold even mean? What kind of name is that? He looks like an idiot."

 

"Honestly? He seems like exactly the guy America deserves."

 

"You got that right, Ted," Jarvis stood up to go back to his office "This country's going to the fucking dogs. I should've known the idiot would bring more idiots. He wasn't even born in America! Back when I was Ted's age we had real Americans…" Thankfully Jarvis had disappeared, though he thought he could still hear the phrase "Kenyan Muslim" every twenty seconds.

 

"Well I hope to see more of him," he said to his dad's executive assistant, Melody, whom he had sat next to in the break room to eat lunch since she was really the only person in the office even close to his age.  "Booster Gold, not my uncle. My uncle can go fuck himself. Would love to meet him."

 

"He's cute," She said after a moment. "At least that's what I think."

 

"Yeah," Ted agreed absentmindedly.  "I mean, for a dude. But yeah, he’s cute."

 

* * *

  

When Ted finally did meet Booster Gold, he realized that every single initial impression of him was absolutely and completely true. He had since covered his suit with sponsorships and stared in six episodes of a pretty horrible, now cancelled reality TV show. His uncle had never uttered a single word about Chiller, the one to actually try and kill the president, and yet the second he set up a Facebook he started posting incoherent rants about glory seekers and the fall of America and any other bullshit Gilbert Godfrey fed him.

 

Booster could talk fast and bounce back almost as good as Ted could, which is probably why the second Batman inducted him into the JLI Booster recognized Ted as a fellow bullshit artist and stuck to him like superglue, which suited Ted just fine as he like Booster more than anyone else on the team. After just their first mission, Ted felt as if he'd known him all his life. 

 

Not to mention, despite everything, he was good at what he did and a better person than most. Some days Ted felt like he was the only one who noticed. The only exception to his initial impression he’d ever admit came years later, when he decided that someone like Booster was better than anyone in the world deserved.

 

(And yeah, Melody was right. He was pretty cute. For a dude).

 

* * *

 

 

For someone who claimed to like history, Ted soon realized that Booster knew _nothing_ about the 21st century. Well, besides what he learned about at his Museum job he rarely talked about, but those were just a bunch of performance stats, code names and important dates surrounding other heroes, and only the most well known ones at that (information Booster did have about the Blue Beetle was so laughably unreliable, Ted began to wonder if someone had altered the information to be false on purpose to play a joke on him). Being a time traveler's best friend involved a lot more long and pedantic explanations than he ever imagined.

 

"Booster, dude, you have to remember this time when I explain it. If you're going to be a crimefighter, especially on a global scale, you have to be an informed citizen, you have to understand these conflicts even if you don't want to pick a side."

 

"Okay. Got it. Let's go though it one more time."

 

"So it started in 2009, when Taylor Swift's _You Belong With Me_ beat out Beyoncé's _Single Ladies_ in the best female video category, which Kanye West protested by taking the stage, interrupting her acceptance speech, and expressing his outrage. While technically _Single Ladies_ was iconic and _You Belong With Me_ was kinda mediocre, most commenters did agree that Kanye was out of - "

 

"Beetle!" Batman interrupted. "Will you focus on driving the bug and tell Booster about the Taylor-Kanye beef on your own time?"

 

"Sorry, sorry."

 

"Honestly though, Beyoncé got Video of the Year," their teammate Bea said after a moment.  "Paparazzi should've won Best Female video.  I don't think it got enough attention for how good it was."

 

"I'm pretty sure Paparazzi won multiple awards, how is that not attention?" Tora asked.

 

"They were for like special effects.  It should've gotten something meatier. Like Best Director. What won that year?"

 

"21 Guns, and it deserved it." Guy answered.

 

"You're just saying that cause GREEN," Tora gestured to his costume. "Day performed the song."

 

"Yeah, cause Green Day's a good band."

 

"Green Day hasn't done anything good since _American Idiot_."

  
"The only reason you didn't _like 21st Century_ was because YOU don't understand the struggle of the working class - "

 

"Hey!"

 

Everyone turned to Batman.

 

"I don't want to hear another word about the 2009 VMA awards. I don't want to know why everyone seems to know more about an award show from over three years ago than the terrorist group we are on our way fight at this moment. If it's not about the mission, I don't want to hear about it, period."

 

"Yes Mr. Batman," Ted whispered so that only Booster could hear. "What's he going to do, put us in detention?"

 

"Beetle!"

 

Ted kept quiet the rest of the trip to Bialya. But only until then.

 

While Ted was the one to catch Booster up on pop culture, helping him understand social cues usually fell to other members of the team.  Frustratingly for Booster, that "help" many times came from someone being absolutely horrified about a thing Booster did or said. Most of the time it was small, like when Guy spent an entire week claiming Booster didn’t know how to use a fork because Guy noticed him eating rice with a spoon (apparently grains became a spoon food at some point), but bigger issues came up as well and usually those were handled with more tact.  Batman of all people had to tell him that sometimes artists put words with very complicated histories into songs, and you shouldn't sing those words out loud because it's not appropriate for you in particular to ever say it, so if it's not in the radio version and you don't know exactly what a word means, keep your mouth shut.

 

Then there was the time Captain Marvel saw Booster’s match mark because he was too lazy or too pissed at 21st century social standards to buy a pack of adhesive patches and cover it up when he was wearing a tank top.  Apparently in Booster's time going out of your way to cover a match mark was unheard of to the point that he was absolutely flabbergasted when everyone took Marvel's side, that while he knew covering your mark was what people did in this time he didn't realize _reasonable_ people cared what others did about it, especially considering the costumes Fire wore without complaint.

 

Ted actually wondered for a while after the incident if in the future it was not uncommon to see people walking around without pants (or maybe pants with crotch less windows, or that fashion line Yoko Ono did), or if people completely forwent clothes and wandered around naked - but Booster laughed upon hearing that theory and informed him that, although less women wore bras and it was no longer necessary to cover female presenting nipples at pools or beaches,  for the most part genitalia stayed in your pants and no shirts, no shoes, no service still applied. "It's just a mark!" Booster insisted.  "I feel like I'm explaining to George Washington why it's okay for women to show ankles!"

 

"Ankles aren't  _personal._  It's like intimate to show someone that."

 

"I'd show you my mark right now, I don't care," To illustrate, Booster began removing his shirt.

 

"Last week you tried to make me look at what you called a 'real gross puss filed mole' on your butt to see if it was cancerous, so I'm not going to use  _you_  as a barometer on what's acceptable. And I want to see your mark about as much as I want to see your butt acne so put your shirt on."

 

Booster glared at him and pulled his shirt back over his head.  "This time period's weird," he mumbled.  "How am I supposed to find my match without seeing our mark?"

 

"Dinner, movies, bring them back to your apartment…"

 

"But your time still has religions that won't marry people if they don’t share a mark! And they're the same ones that don't allow pre-marital sex! How long do they expect you to know a person before showing them your mark?"

 

"Well, it's not _totally_ the same as sex, you can show it to someone once you start dating - some places in the south it's a whole thing, if you like someone you're supposed to check them and God says you can't date if it doesn't match, even if you're just looking for someone casual to take to prom and get to third base with in the parking lot. It's just rude to parade it around for everyone to see. It's special, it's just between you and your match."

 

"Well we can't share anything special if we can't find each other."

 

Ted decided to leave it and mess with his phone.  Booster ended up just sitting with the kind of far off, wistful look in his eyes he got whenever matches were brought up. Whoever they were, they'd better be as perfect as Booster seemed to think they were.  Apparently once they met Booster was going to spend all his time with them to call each other gross pet names and abandon all his friends - well, he actually said that when he met them he wanted to just sit, and talk, and spend time together, but Ted knew better. While he did force himself to stop dreading the day Booster found them, Ted did hope that Booster would still have time to hang out with him, _alone,_ not bringing along someone who was going to spend the entire time trying to eat Booster's face.

 

Ted had wondered for a while if Booster's match was back in the 25th century, but Booster said his mark looked more like one from this time than one from his own, and that when he traveled to another time he felt a kind of distance.

 

Sometimes Ted got that same fuzzy feeling in his chest that he did the day his mark showed up, the one that made him somehow feel better and worse all at the same time, when he was falling asleep or started thinking about her - the absence of that must've been what Booster had been referring too.

 

Ted felt it again, the emotion just three degrees away from heartbreak, sitting next to Booster and flipping through Facebook. Being fair to Booster, he spent a lot of time wishing he could be with his match as well, and he would give anything in the world to tell her he loved her. But at least he didn't go on about it. And he knew even when his match and him got together, _he'd_ make time to see Booster.


	3. Part 2

 "Ted," someone whispered, poking him in the face. "Te-ed. Teddy. Wake up. It's important."

 

Ted woke up in the back of a Lyft with Booster Gold sitting next to him, shaking him awake.  "Are we back yet?" he mumbled.

 

"No. No stupid we got like - we got like a hundred minutes in this car left."

 

"What's important?"

 

"So like - I saw a poster for a concert outside the bar."

  
"Yeah?"

 

"And it was for Beyoncé’s concert, _Mrs. Carter World Tour?_ "

 

"Uh huh?"

 

"And like - my last name is Carter…and Beyoncé's last name is Carter…do you think… _I'm_ descended…from Beyoncé?" Booster whispered the question as if it was…Ted didn't know, the Da Vinci Code? He was drunk and tired.

 

He had to stare at him for a long time just to make sure he was being serious.  Booster didn't laugh. "No."

 

"Ted - Teddy wake back up.  Is it because my butt isn't as nice as hers? Because I could've got Jay-Z's butt instead."

 

"I was two classes away from a genetic biology minor Michael, I do know how these things work."

 

"Okay. So she could be."

 

"I don't think Beyoncé genes make," Ted gestured to Booster. "Whatever's going on her."

 

"Hey!" Booster whispered. 

 

"Skeets," Ted leaned over to tap the robot that had fallen into sleep mode on the middle seat. "Skeets, tell me who Booster's ancestor from the Carter family is in this time."

 

Ted could've sworn he heard the robot grumble, but he did flash up a picture of a not unattractive young man in a college football uniform captioned 'Daniel Carter'.

 

"Oh," Booster whispered, disappointed. "Though to be honest it makes sense -"

 

"Skeets, this picture is ten years old, that's the old Soder Cola label sponsoring the stadium.  Pull up something from his Facebook."

 

Ted could've sworn the robot glared at him.  After a slightly longer pause, Dan "Da Man" Carter's Facebook page loaded.  The first picture was of a slightly fatter Daniel Carter standing by a deer carcass outside a trailer with a group of early thirties men and women captioned 'Deer Season: While you're at the bar chasing hoes, we're in the woods chasing does 🦌🔫😜 my boys Dillon, Justin, Mason, Brody, the lovely lady Savannah and not so lovely lady Sarah (JK I LOVE YOU BITCH) gonna have VENISON 4 DAYZ'. 

 

"Mikey…Mikey I'm so sorry…this…this is the polar opposite of Beyoncé."

 

"Ted. Ted don't make fun of my ancestors."

 

"I'm not!" Ted insisted.  He really wasn't, the group of friends obviously cared for each other and enjoyed the trip judging from the comments. The trip appeared to be an annual one since high school - when Daniel commented that it would be the last one, Brody and Savannah assured him that they would bring 'the baby' with them next year in a desert storm colored baby carrier. "This…this just isn't Beyoncé. Look, he's happy, he has friends!"

 

As if to refute that, Skeets pulled up the next picture, of Daniel and a pretty brunette woman.  This one was captioned: "#TBT to when i met my beautiful sexy rosie, my best friend, perfect match and soulmate. iknow you think im not good enough for you since your a big city reporter at the omaha sun now and im just the assistant manager at del taco but every day we spend apart I feel like im dyign. I dont expect u to come to me since ur dreams are too big for a place like st james. But from googlemaps I saw that there's del tacos in omaha for me to manage (i got promoted last week to full manager cause i applied myself like u told me to) and even though I cant provide for u I always thought ud be the one to make all the money anyway since I only no how 2 play football and tore my achillies in college #feminism I love you baby we can still get married. please answer my voicemails." The lone comment, from his mother, read "it's sunday".

 

The two stared in silence at the proof of a mental breakdown from an obviously devastated man, though the post certainly indicated Rose had every good reason to go work at the Omaha Sun and leave her match back in St. James, wherever that was. Ted knew whoever his was, he couldn’t think of a reason he’d leave her – him? Them? Ted shook his head as if to physically table that particular internal discussion yet again.

 

Well, whoever they were, he knew he wouldn’t have to leave them like Rose did _(you don't actually know,_ a small voice in the back of his skull whispered) because he had the money and emotional energy a young woman suffocating in a small town didn't and he _could_ help someone in a bad place get therapy or whatever they needed ( _because money's made you so emotionally stable)._

 

But he knew sometimes things like this happened - he'd known since he was a kid even. The two boys from his robotics team who matched as teenagers and were so happy about it, until one's parents made the two sit exposed in the living room while his mom pointed out freckles and tan lines to claim that they actually _didn't_ have the same mark, because God would never give two boys the same ones and it was all a misunderstanding. The other boy's parents pulled him from school and banned him from the internet, who didn't even know his match's last name because everything happened so quickly and he just _couldn't remember_ it - last he heard he hadn’t found his match again. The sixteen-year-old girl in his high school who had gotten pregnant, who found her match at a water park eight years later when jet stream knocked off her bikini top. He helped her out of the water and told her who he was, even threw a towel over himself to take off his patch and give her a glance at his mark for proof - but when the little girl who was with Ted's old classmate called her "mom", the man made an excuse to leave and she never saw him again. He had even overheard Batman and Superman arguing a year ago, Batman telling his friend that he was a naïve idiot if he thought that Selina and him had any place for each other. He hadn't heard Batman express any strong emotion except anger until that day.

 

What he did as Blue Beetle wasn't exactly conducive to relationships.

 

_Maybe they'll hurt you. Maybe they'll be the ones to leave you. Maybe she'll hate that you're Blue Beetle and you won't be able to give it up, even for her, or she has her own dreams that, no matter how hard you try to make it work, you can't be a part of. Maybe -_

 

"According to my records, Daniel Carter married a woman named Rose Levin three years from now. They had three children, the youngest being Michael Carter's ancestor, and when Daniel was the Del Taco regional manager for the Omaha area, those Del Tacos made record profits. I would like to stress that I only have the information on Omaha Del Tacos because Booster got drunk and hungry in the 25th century and made me replace nuclear engineering records with, and I quote, _'every fact about Del Taco in recorded history'._ "

 

"Ted. Ted!" Booster whispered.

 

"Yeah, I'm still awake!"

 

"Ted. This is what you meant. I can't have Beyoncé genetics because she has like singing and dancing genes.  I can't sing but like, I fucking love Del Taco. I have Del Taco genes.  Del Taco is in my blood."

 

Ted would've found this oddly endearing if he wasn't afraid Booster was about to vomit all over him.

 

"Yeah, I'm going back to sleep." 

 

* * *

 

 

For a while, Ted called the years he spent with the JLI the best of his life. Really, the worse part of the experience was when the UN disbanded the team and it was all over.

 

At first he only missed the big things.  Seeing his friends everyday, having someone to bounce ideas off of during investigations, an unlimited supply of 'J'onn's Chocos, do not eat' in the kitchen. Then he began to miss the things he didn't care for at the time, like the constant bickering, or Captain Marvel's bi-monthly pleas in meetings to stop the incessant profanity, or Maxwell Lord yelling at everyone when they caused a PR scandal. And while at the time Ted would've insisted they all hated each other, that wasn't true at all. Everyone cared.

 

But because he had to, life moved on.

 

Then Ted Kord got shot. By Maxwell Lord. In the face.

 

He woke up from the coma less than a year later, head full of nightmares that he had died and turned into a zombie and tried to, he didn't know, eat his friends’ brains?

 

Then Booster explained that he actually didn't wake up from a coma, he _did_ die, he _had_ turned into a Zombie (Black Lantern but same difference), he _didn't_ try to eat his friends brains because he was too busy trying to eat their goddamn hearts, and Booster knew he wasn't really dead because he had been to the year they were in before and actually had gotten drinks with him, and even double checked that no one was messing with the timelines after he got shot, but oh no, no one believes poor grief filled Booster Gold, even when he is 100% correct, guess poor incompetent Booster has to go jump through time by himself to make sure Beetle doesn’t fucking die while everyone else plans his funeral and writes his obituaries, oh god please make it stop, he can't have died, how could he die when he’s alive, why did he want to eat people's hearts, make it stop -

 

Thankfully Batman, Wonder Woman and Superman didn't take the mental breakdown that followed as some sort of permanent post resurrection psychosis and just made him get psychiatric treatment instead of locking him up in Arkham, while Melody legally resurrected him. She even got the KORD inc. board of directors to re-instate him, as long as he promised to not touch the business affairs side of the company because once Melody took over that job things actually started running smoothly, which he happily agreed to since, at the end of the day, he just wanted to invent robots anyway.

 

Well, invent robots and join the Justice League.

 

While Ted could concede that most of the JLI would be incompatible with the JLA for personality reasons, he did think he was entirely within reason to ask Batman if he could be considered for membership. He (as well as the rest of the team) were perfectly competent on missions, and Blue Beetle himself had only been involved with one (maybe two if you really stretch his involvement) international incident, but his request was denied both times he asked. The second time, they even asked him for a favor after rejecting him! They wanted to know if he had any job openings for a speedster from the 31st century they ran into, since he was 'used to dealing with time travelers'.

 

Teri seemed nice enough though and she actually had been rejected from the League as well (apparently being a member in the future meant about as much as being in the JLI), so he hired her since she was a medical doctor and Ted had wanted to focus more on biomedical research anyway. Ted wondered if twins were more likely to get into time travel than non twins after he found out that she had a twin brother, but that question was soon replaced with _why did your parents name you Teri and your brother Terry, why is this a thing, I thought Michael and Michelle were bad enough and what do you mean you know there were a Don and Dawn in the Legion, what is wrong with people, can the future not think of two names, I swear to god -_

 

Teri also was the first one to demand he go to a doctor after he had fallen asleep at work for the fourth time which, once the fourth time turned into the seventh (and after he complained about her insistence Booster, Scott and J’onn, who all told him to please, _please_ see a doctor) he did.


	4. Part 3

Ted felt like an idiot. No, scratch that - he _was_ an idiot. He had an IQ nearing 200 (and was smart enough to know IQ tests were bullshit, but scoring that high had to mean something), had a background in three types of engineering, graduated high school at 16, got his first degree by 19 and had two more by the age of 23, built a fucking hovercraft and had a hand in most of the KORD Inc. R&D projects, and yet he was still so, _so_ stupid.

 

He was sitting almost naked on a sheet in the doctor's office, listening to her tell him that he had a seven syllable long genetic heart condition, that he was tired all the time because he'd had five fucking heart attacks in his life, that he should stop drinking seven shots a night when going to bars and eating fast food twice a week, and, most importantly of all, while light exercise was still important, he'd better stop doing "gymnastics and crossfit" immediately as a third of the time when athletes drop dead while exercising they have what he does.

 

He still couldn't believe it took five heart attacks to notice. He must have thought they were severe anxiety attacks at the time.

 

The doctor assured him it wasn't a death sentence, but to Ted it might as well have been. No booze, no greasy food, and no more Blue Beetle. He basically couldn't do anything that brought him joy in life unless he wanted to die. Hell, when he asked the doctor sarcastically if sex was too strenuous, she gave him a list of warning signs and told him to stop in the middle of it if he felt any of them! Not that he'd even gone out on a date in over a year, much less slept with anyone (dying and putting his life back together had put his sex life on hold), but still.

 

After about a week of wallowing in self pity, Booster texted him to ask if he could give him some backup that night since he had personally angered another member of the 1000 and should probably get help freeing the prisoners from their trafficking ring in Suicide Slums like he had planned to do that night because, you know, if the guy who was pissed at him found Booster he had 999 friends to help beat him up.

 

Ted suggested Guy Gardner help instead, but that if everything went well he'd meet him at the Ace o' Clubs in Metropolis for lunch tomorrow.

 

"So basically I can't be Blue Beetle anymore," Ted explained to his friend.  "And one of the symptoms is sudden death, so I'm probably not going to live long enough to finish the improved Bug model I've been designing, or even find love since I haven't had a serious relationship over five years so that's not changing anytime soon, and even if I do, I probably won't live long enough to get married, well, if my match would even be willing to marry someone who was just going to die three minutes after the wedding, or have kids even, because if I'm just going to die in two years why would I have kids? All it would do is give them emotional baggage and, oh yeah, a _possibly genetic heart condition_. I mean, I don't even know if I _want_ kids, I was going to decide on that when I got older, but I'm not going to get older because I'm going to die of sudden cardiac failure, and die _for real_ this time, no take backs, no second chances."

 

Ted ended his rant and looked up at Booster - who had taken out his phone.

 

"Are you listening to me Booster?"

 

"No."

 

Ted was about to ask him what about his phone was so interesting when Booster answered him.  "Ted, you said you had Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy?"

 

"Yeah, HCM."

 

"Ted, Wikipedia says that the annual mortality rate for this thing is 1%."

 

"Are you not taking this seriously?"

 

"I am, I just…Teddy, this study from almost fifteen years ago says that most people with this thing have a normal life expectancy. You seem to be doing everything correctly health wise now. Why would you stress out over the worse possible scenario? Especially when you're giving up so much else because of this?"

 

On one hand, he knew Booster was right. On the other, he still couldn't shake the creeping feeling of dread.   
  
"Plus, you can still do plenty of superheroics without going in the field - like maybe the Blue Beetle can be your username on the dark web while you expose child pornographers, or you can do the GPS google shit I make Skeets do but for other people.  Actually, you could probably charge for the last one - 'Keep Blue Beetle on call to remotely hack into the mainframe for $20, each mainframe hack is $15 a pop'. You could make some decent money doing that. Or you could be like, I don’t know, a crimefighting coach?"

 

Booster did have a point - he wouldn't have to give up designing gadgets if he was part of a larger team again, and really that was the best part of being Blue Beetle anyway.

 

"And if you don't have to train anymore, that gives you a lot more time to date anyway. You know what? My appearance manager Trixie is single, let me see if I can book _her_ an appearance this time around - an appearance in your bed, that is."

 

"Please don't tell me you're planning on using that pun on her when you try to set us up."

 

Booster's phone made a swooshing sound the moment Ted finished his sentence.  "Uh…"

 

Ted shook his head and laughed. "Well, I'm setting up a new regional headquarters in El Pasa next week and the one after, so if she's interested we can meet up after that. Though she might not be after that text."

 

Ted should've known he was being ridiculous, because even when Booster was being unreasonable he could see through Ted's bullshit.  While Trixie decided that she did not, under any circumstances, want to date a person Booster Gold called his _'Best friend, partner in crime(fighting) and wingman'_ , he eventually begin training a high school student that had a magic amulet fused to his spine as the next Blue Beetle, a task that got him out of the labs more than he was expecting while not becoming crossfit level strenuous.

 

And if he did put back on the costume once or twice to help Booster out of a jam, well _obviously_ his Doctor only meant _regularly_ strenuous activity, helping your best friend escape a murder charge didn't count. Or maybe a few trips in the time sphere to correct a few anomalies here or there - those obviously didn't count either.

 

It was after the fourth time he helped Booster fix a time anomaly that he had to admit that maybe it was starting to be a problem - but at the end of their little adventure they had to get some New Gods tech looked at, which meant they got dinner with Scott and Barda afterwards and with how busy all of them are that rarely happens, so _really_ the fourth one didn't count since he could file all of that away as a social visit. And three time anomalies plus one murder investigation isn't a problem yet.

 

Ted didn't remember how the conversation turned to match marks - it was probably a question from Scott or Barda since New Gods didn't have them (a concept that Ted had an easier time with when talking about Martians or Tamaranians - _Scott and Barda look human_ , how do they not have marks?).  Scott thought that for sure the entire thing evolved from something horrible Darksied did thousands of years ago, since it sounded like 'the most goddamn stressful thing to add to a relationship'. Booster would always say, as he did again that night, that he had fallen in love multiple time before and the only reason he wasn't pinning after them forever was because he had proof it wasn't meant to be, which Ted tended to agree with.

 

If New Gods did have matches, Ted had no doubt that Scott and Barda would be each other's.  And the fact that the two of them found each other in the pits of Apokolips, fell in love and had one of the most stable relationships of anyone he ever met without any help, without any assurance that they were in fact the right people for each other, drove Ted up a wall.

 

"I mean, I'd assume you'd eventually start double checking your close friends?" Barda asked. "Like you two know for sure you're not matched with each other, right?"

 

"Well, I know I'm not matched with Ted, and the rest of the JLI for that matter, because we were on the same team together and sometimes had to change clothes quickly," Booster explained.

 

Scott snorted into his coffee. "If anyone in the League at the time was matched with Booster, they'd know it, trust me."

 

"Yeah, for someone with a background in team sports, you had _no_ concept of locker etiquette," Ted pointed out.

 

"Ted, don't start this, he's going to talk about the different kinds of underwear."

 

"Barda, as these two know, because I have explained it many times, I need to wear this tight nude-colored underwear under my suit because if it's too dark you can sometimes see the color bleed through and if it's loose you get fabric bunched up - and it has to be this high waisted spanx thing otherwise it falls down when you're flying. But it's really tight and uncomfortable if you wear it for too long, so I have to change into boxers when I take the costume off, and you have to kinda jump out of it- "

 

"What's _really_ weird is how every other member of the JLI also wore skin tight suits and yet were able to find underwear we can wear under different outfits."

 

"Long story short, they would know." Scott interrupted.  "And if the two of them didn't notice, someone else would've helpfully pointed it out. Well, after a few weeks of laughing at you behind your backs. Maybe Guy would've tried to delay it since his date was so far out in the betting pool."

 

"Betting pool?" Barda asked.

 

"They were betting on when we were going to ‘give into the sexual tension’ and fuck," Ted explained.

 

_"They?!_ You two entered the pool as well!"

 

"Well Ted suggested we 'leak' a sex tape in one of the years we put money on and collect, seeing as we could actually control when the, I don't know what to call it, 'event?' happened."

 

"Ted suggested that?" Scott asked.  "You suggested making a gay sex tape as part of a money-making scheme and you still thought you were straight?"

 

"I thought at the time it was the money I was attracted to."

 

"Wait, back up," Booster interrupted "What do you mean 'thought you were straight?'"

 

"Oh. Well, I'm not. Into guys, into gals, into people who aren't either. Even into some aliens, though not the bug looking ones - if Forager asks if I'm single let him down easy -"

 

"Wait, since when? Why does Scott know and I don't?"

 

Booster actually looked deeply hurt since Scott knew and he didn't, so Ted bit back the urge to make smart ass comment about how he thought gender and sexuality were more flexible in the 25th century. "I don't know, two years ago?  Three chronologically? Well, since I was a teenager if I'm being honest with myself but since I _am_ into girls I could kind of ignore it."

 

"Three years and you didn't tell me?"

 

"I didn't tell anyone; I mean, I wasn’t hiding it but I didn't want to make a big deal out of it."

 

"And I only know because Barda and I were hanging out with Nick after Pilates class and Ted showed up on his Tindr."

 

"Who's _Nick?_ "

 

"I don't know, he swiped left on me!" Ted insisted, though to be fair whatever happened (or didn't) between Nick and Ted wasn't really any of Booster's business. "And I only had the app installed for maybe two weeks. Not that I owe you anything, but I didn't sleep with anyone male or female since I realized it, so I didn't seem think it was all relevant to bring up! If you had asked me I probably would've told you!"

 

"Why would I ask you if you were bi? We've known each other forever, I thought I knew you were straight."

 

"I'm just trying to say I wasn't keeping it a secret from you." Although Ted thought Booster was being unreasonable and Ted reacted like a normal human being, he couldn't help but add "I'm sorry, I didn't realize not telling you would bother you."

 

"No - you're right," Booster responded stiffly "Don't apologize. You don't have to tell me anything, I'm sorry I made a big deal out of it."

 

After the argument the four paid and said their goodbyes quickly. It wasn't until Ted had gotten home that night when he realized that Booster wasn't quite correct about knowing for sure if they had the same marks.  To be honest, Ted _didn't_ know if Booster was his or not. He only _thought_ he wasn’t because for years he thought he was straight, and come to think of it, he didn't think he'd actually ever seen Booster's mark. But if Ted wasn't straight and covered his mark with a patch basically all the time, and he hadn't ever actually seen Booster's mark even after all those years in close contact, he didn't know.

 

Booster had told him he's fallen in love before, and that if he didn't know they weren't his he'd pine over them forever. Ted wondered if he was one of the people he had fallen in love with.

 

Ted loved Michael more than anyone else in the world, but he didn't know if that mattered for anything, since the world was full of people he hasn't even met yet. At the very least he owed him a definitive answer if Ted thought there was any doubt. Ted glanced at his phone - he could grab a picture of his mark and tell him the truth, that Booster was wrong and he'd probably hadn't seen Ted's mark, but here it was if he wanted to check.

 

Ted got as far as going to his bathroom where there was a mirror to help him get a shot of his back when he thought better of it.  Booster seemed confident that Ted wasn't his, and if his friend ever had fallen in love with him it would be better to not open old wounds.

 

Ted finally agreed with the people in Booster's time who had decided hiding match marks was pointless though.  He was starting to think that hiding them caused a whole lot of trouble.

 

* * *

 

When Booster mentioned a complicated time anomaly to Ted for the fifth time, Booster hesitated to answer when Ted asked if he needed help.

 

"Aren't you supposed to be retired? I thought your Doctor said no more Blue Beetle."

 

"No, she said no more gymnastics and crossfit."

 

"Because you didn't tell her you dress up in blue spandex to fight supervillians."

 

"I'll just stay in the time sphere and I'll only get in on the action if you need me."

 

"Well, I always need you," Booster quickly added the addendum "When you come with me, I mean.  You always end up running into danger anyway."

 

But in the end Booster couldn't say no. 

 

And neither should’ve worried.  They returned to the 21st century fine – beaten and bruised, so exhausted they could barely move, but fine. Most of Booster’s costume had been incinerated and he had been using a foil emergency blanket for warmth, and Ted was pretty sure he had dislocated his shoulder, but they were fine.

 

“How did you dislocate your shoulder? You got hit in the stomach?” Booster asked groggily as he searched Ted’s fridge for food.  “I’m so tired. I don’t even want to eat.”

 

“You can sleep on the couch,” Ted offered. “I’m hungry.”

 

Ted threw some pasta on the stove while Booster sat at the kitchen table, staring into space. “Seriously, go lie down. There’s blankets under the coffee table.”

 

As if on autopilot, Booster stood walked to the living room. Before the pasta finished though, Ted realized he wasn’t really hungry either.  His stomach twisted as if trying to escape his body – maybe that punch to the abdomen had injured more than he thought.

 

The kitchen started to spin – wow, he must be tired.  He was too dizzy to clean up the pasta; Ted would have to do that in the morning. Now he should sleep.

 

Booster had fallen asleep on the floor in a crumpled heap, the emergency blanket only covering him halfway. Ted reached down absent mindedly to pull the blanket over his shoulder - 

 

And then he stopped. His hand hovered over a small black mark on Booster's back that matched the one he himself had.

 

He dropped the blanket, the loud crinkling of the foil hiding the sound of his rushed footsteps into the bathroom. 

 

Ted suddenly became very cold, like he was going into shock. He couldn’t breathe. He threw up moments after kneeling over the toilet seat.  

 

He felt as if he were in a dream.  The bathroom grew blurry around him, spinning in circles as he crumpled to the floor.  His chest felt as if someone had reached inside and clenched it. He couldn't even reach up to grab the counter. Then it clicked.

 

_Shit_. He thought to himself _. Fucking shit. You goddamn idiot_. 

 

He'd been having a heart attack for the last half an hour.

 

Ted tried to remember where he left his phone.  He couldn't. It wasn’t in his pocket and he couldn't stand up, so it wouldn't matter anyway.  "Booster!" he yelled, hoping he could hear him from the other room. "Mike! Wake up!"

 

The cord to a hairdryer hung by Ted's face - he pulled on it so the dryer tumbled to the floor.  After a moment, he heard the crinkling of the emergency blanket and a pair of heavy footsteps running towards the bathroom -

 

There were sirens and there was yelling, but he barely registered any of that.  The next time he really gained any awareness of his surroundings, it was early the next morning in a tiny hospital room. The curtains had only been partially closed - he could see some light filtering in. Doctors had covered his chest in electrodes and stuck an IV in his arm. In the chair next to him, Booster had fallen asleep, curled around himself like a cat to fit on the small piece of furniture. 

 

He seemed to sense that Ted had woken up and had begun to stir himself.  "You awake?" Booster asked quietly upon opening his eyes.

  
"Yeah," Ted answered.  "I'm awake. Is it Sunday?"

 

"Yeah, it's Sunday," Booster responded.  "It's only been five hours.  You should go back to sleep."

 

Ted didn't respond at first. _You didn't see what you thought you did,_ a voice inside him whispered. _You were having a heart attack, no way you could focus enough to see they were the same. His just looks kinda similar, that's it._

 

He could've easily decided that he had imagined everything and pretend he saw nothing. Well, maybe not easily.  He'd always be second guessing himself. 

 

"Can you check my back?" Ted asked Booster.

 

"For what?"

 

"You'll know if you see it."

 

Booster gave him a confused look, but stood up and walked to the bed all the same to humor him.  Ted leaned forward - a nurse or someone must have taken his clothes off and put him in a hospital robe, because he could feel the air on his shoulder immediately. 

 

"What am I looking fo - " Booster cut himself off mid question and took a sharp breath inward. Ted felt a cold hand on his lower back for a few seconds before Booster pulled it away again, confirming that he hadn't imagined anything.  Ted leaned back into the bed, but Booster hadn't moved an inch - he even still held his cold hand in front of his face. 

 

"I couldn't see that well in the dark - and your blanket was covering a small part of it, I didn't even mean to look really. So I wasn't sure - "

 

Booster cut him off. "It's mine."

 

Neither knew what to say next, so neither said anything for a good hour, when a nurse came in to check Ted's vitals.

 

"You're recovering well," she informed him. "Blood sugar is normal. Speaking of blood sugar, the menu's on your bedside table if you want to order breakfast.  Just make sure to get it in quick, if you miss the pickup try and see if your husband can bring it to…" She trailed off upon seeing the expressions on their faces. 

 

"Oh god, the pair of guys in room 230 were married, not you two. I'm so sorry, it's the end of my shift and I'm getting everyone confused."

 

"I just have Ted's healthcare power of attorney."

 

"I did _not_ mean to make this so awkward. Uh, just make sure the breakfast sheet is filled in by 8:00 am."

 

"I mean - not _just_ the power of attorney thing. You're also my best friend, you know? So I don't want you to worry about whatever's going on here until you're well - I'll be whatever you need me to be until then, you've been there for me through the bullshit at Sanctuary and everything else, now it's my turn. And I just need you to know that I love you so much. And that last night I spent two hours thinking that you were going to die, so those hours were the worst hours I've ever had."

 

The words hung heavy in the air like a fog. "Okay, I'm leaving. See you tomorrow." The Nurse said quickly, rushing out of the room.

 

"I do get her confusion," Ted began after a few moments. "We do everything together, we confide in each other, one of us always shows up and refuses to leave when the other one's in danger, all of our legal documents name each other as benefactors or proxies, we're not having sex, we're - we're matched. All we need is a joint bank account and a pair of monogramed bathrobes."

 

"We have the bathrobes - remember that weekend we went to Vegas with Bea and Tora? We got them at that creepy looking shop off the strip."

 

"Bold of you to assume I remember _anything_ from that trip. I know we looked like Hugh Hefner wanabees because they were velour. I thought for sure they belonged to the hotel."

 

"Oh, you know what? They DID belong to the Hotel. The girls bought those huge flesh colored ultra-veiney looking vibrators at the creepy store. Either way they're in my coat closet at home, I don't do anything with them but they spark joy so I went ahead and kept them."

 

"Okay, just a bank account then."

 

"Wait, do married people really not have sex in this time? I thought that was just a joke."

 

"I don't know, I haven't been married. I'd assume it's a joke."

 

Booster turned to his nails as if trying to choose his words carefully. "People match all the time without it having anything to do with sex you know."

 

"Yeah, but they it's because they don't like sex in the first place. _I_ like sex. _You_ like sex."

 

"There's always exceptions."

 

While they were more common in Booster's time, when people don't hide their marks, Ted was no stranger to the concept of conversations like these.  He was not the first or last person to stumble upon a match before becoming intimate with them, and even couples with a more traditional relationship progression had to have the discussion of what matching means _now_ for a relationship.

 

"Well, as I told you last month, I'm not only attracted to women. I haven't really done much about it, but I know.”

 

"I just want you to know that I don't expect anything."

 

"Okay," Ted grabbed the menu from the bedside table to look through the food options.  "The eggs are usually powdered. Think I'm going to go with oatmeal."

 

Ted didn't want to talk about any of this and Booster didn't want to deal with him ignoring him, so he took the form to the nurse's station even though whoever was assigned to pick up orders hadn't come around yet.  "Wanted to make sure my _'husband's'_ order got in," Booster told the same nurse as before. She smiled and gestured to the dropbox, relieved Booster at least that he was in good spirts about the mistake (well, he was pretending to at least).

 

"Husband!?" a familiar voice exclaimed. Booster turned around to see Beatriz, Tora and Guy making their way over to him. "When did you get married?!" Tora continued.

 

"I win the betting pool," Bea sang.  "How much was it again?"

 

"No, it's a joke," Booster clarified.  "Bwa ha ha, lol, just kidding.  She just got us confused with the guy in the next room over -- what are you doing here anyway? It's seven thirty am."

 

"We wanted to make sure Ted was okay! You weren't answering my texts," Bea explained.

 

"I was busy."

 

"Doing what? You can't just text someone 'hey Teddy had another heart attack, I can't help with any emergencies today' and not elaborate!"

 

"He's stable. And we've been up since six fifteen so probably tired too. Come back at a reasonable time."

 

"I'll just pop in for a second then."

 

Booster groaned as the other three made their way to Ted's room.

 

Upon seeing that Ted was alive and talking, his former team members agreed to only stay for a few minuets, especially when security caught up with the unregistered visitors bursting in on off hours.

 

Guy however lingered behind for a moment. "I - I have something to confess. And apologize for. And you know that I don't normally apologize for anything - but. Speaking of the dumb bet, I didn't tell you before because of it but it was stupid of me and you deserve to know. You - you two should know that, well. You have the same - "

 

"We know," Ted interrupted. "Thanks for telling us before I died the first time."

 

"Booster told me you weren't really dead; it didn't even count - "

 

"Guy, maybe you should leave?" Booster suggested.

 

Ted took Booster escorting Guy out of the room as an opportunity to fake going back to sleep.

 


	5. Part 4

If Michael had to spend another moment in this hospital room, he was going lose his mind.

 

He left a note to Ted that he'd be back (in case he woke up) and wandered across a rooftop courtyard, then the cafeteria, then to the hospital pharmacy. It was almost funny how little hospitals differed from now until the 25th Century, especially with everything else changing so dramatically.  He remembered wandering through a pharmacy not unlike this one when his mom was sick. He was fifteen. His sister met up with him in the store and imminently accused him of not telling her he got his psychmark like he promised he would when he did - but he hadn't even noticed it yet.  She noticed it peaking out from his tank top and had to take a picture of it so he could see the mark too.

 

He probably spent five straight minutes staring at the design on his tablet while Michelle picked out her snacks - the lines were thick but soft, not at all like the dainty geometric pattern Michelle had. There was something oddly vintage about it as well, reminiscent of Heroic Age marks he had seen in books. Maybe his person studied history. Or maybe it looked that way because _he_ liked history, and the old parts were from his brain, as a message to whoever else had this mark that they were looking for someone who VR'ed serials like _New League_ and _Teen Wonders._

 

"Are you still staring at that?" Michelle asked her brother upon finding him staring at his screen in the corner.

 

"I just - they're out there."

 

"I know; I'm surprised anyone would love you too."

 

"Ha. But - did you feel it? When your mark appeared - like all of a sudden, there's someone reaching out to you? Like yesterday there was just the expanse of space, and now there's someone standing right next to you?"

 

Michelle looked at him oddly. "I mean, I felt excited I guess. Happy. But I had a feeling like it might happen. My skin even started darkening around where it showed up. Brain scans show it's not a myth, you're subconsciously communicating with them for months before hand, maybe even years."

 

"Well, maybe our subconsciouses were procrastinating."

 

"Actually, that's probably true. Someone who was on time wouldn't be able to stand you."

 

"Yeah," Michael had stopped paying attention to his sister and instead began staring at the symbol again as they made their way to the elevator.  He couldn't really explain how he felt. Somewhere between thinking the symbol was so perfect he wanted to cry and an unfocused warmth in his chest.

 

"Aw, little Mikey's in love."

 

"Stop it, 'Shell"

 

"Wait 'till I tell Mom. She's going to embarrass the shit out of you."

 

"Don't do that -"

 

Michelle burst into their mom's hospital room and rushed over to her. "It's a miracle, Mom! I have the best news in the world."

 

Though she was sick, sicker than Ted ever was, she still leaned over to hug her daughter and ask her what the good news was.

 

"Michael's capable of being loved by another human! Some other loser's subconscious realized they couldn't do any better and settled for him!"

 

Their mom did not appreciate Michelle's method of announcement, but was happy for him all the same, that he was almost all grown up now and oh-god-you-two-were-only-born-yesterday-where-did-15-years-go.  She made a big embarrassing deal out of it like any good parent from Michael's time would (not like parents in this time, who's kids only mentioned it to their parents if they were worried something was wrong).

 

Michael didn't know it at the time, but that night across town and a decade in his future, he and Ted sat at an underground bar his younger self had only just heard of, where the coolest artists, up-and coming acts and influencers would visit. It closed just a week before Michael turned 18 after a roach infestation, which Michael thought was ridiculous since if the roaches were good enough for the neo-holopunks and AI programmers of Gotham, they were just fine with Michael. Ted wanted to see the future and Booster chose a time when the bar he missed out on by a week was in it's prime.

 

It was the youngest Michael Carter had ever existed alongside Ted Kord. By noon the next day his older self had found Ted in the apartment of a girl they met with Technicolor hair and skin that glowed purple in the dark, and took him home before his hangover even subsided.

 

The bridge between their subconscious had been slashed, and when Michael reached out, he felt nothing in return.

 

It took Michael awhile to realize that it was this lack of contact making him feel like shit. He thought at first he was sick, or depressed, or upset about his mom's illness, or just going through a shitty stage of puberty.  But the first night his mark had appeared, he could focus very hard on their symbol and feel that faint warm perfect feeling. He spent an hour one day lying in bed, holding the spot on his back where their mark was and staring at a tracing he had made from Michelle's picture, trying to feel how he did the first night and feeling nothing. 

 

Michael never completely gave up hope, but he did, for his own sake, start assuming his person had died not long after they found each other.

 

He hoped it happened quickly and that it was an accident. Not that the wonderful person who made him feel warm and happy for those few hours suffered or had been sick, or that someone had murdered them (Michael made a promise to himself that if he ever saw the perfect little mark he shared with them on a set of autopsy photos or in a broadcasted court-case, he would kill the murder himself).  He _really_ hopped his person wasn't involved in drugs or worse, some other horribly destructive behavior, because if that where it then it means they didn't think to check the image match websites (he had posted his mark to the biggest ones before even leaving the hospital) to find him as soon as they realized they could if they were unloved or unhappy. He would have asked them where they were and figured out how to get there. He would have held them in his arms and told them that things would be better now, that they had each other, that they were the most perfect and wonderful person he'd ever met and that he already knew they would love each other more than anything in the world -

 

By the time Michael started college, he accepted that nothing he could have done would have saved them.  He could've joined a group or something to talk about it, but that would mean admitting out loud that he had given up, and he didn’t want to do that.

 

His first night in the past, after a whirlwind day of press and attention, right as he was falling asleep, his thoughts wandered to his "match" (as they called them here), and how he was now _actually in_ the time their mark reminded him of -

 

Booster bolted up in bed and grabbed his chest. There it was. The warm perfect feeling deep inside him he only ever felt the night his mark first appeared.

 

His match _was_ dead. But only because they had been born five hundred years before him.

 

From what he remembered in the ebooks he read about this time, it would be harder to find them. But he _could_. They could be together like he always wanted. "Oh god you scared me," He whispered. And even though sometimes he'd lose contact when time traveling, he never went that long without the distant warm perfect feeling bubbling up over the surface.  Even in that year he spent in Gotham - the year he fucked everything up and almost killed everyone, he felt his match on the edge of his dreams at night. Slowly, the years he thought his match had died faded away, the other horrible memories from those years taking prominence.  Eventually when he thought of his match, he didn't necessarily even bring to mind the years he thought he lost them.

 

Booster only realized the day he took Ted to must have been the same day his mark appeared when he stood in the pharmacy staring at bottles of cold medicine. For the first time since last night, he felt the warmth in his chest. He had gotten perspective enough to even feel whether he began thinking of them or they started thinking about him. Not that either of them could _really_ control it - he had long realized that him trying to cause it or not had little effect on if it happened - but he did figure out that when he thought about his match and the random ones brought a very slight different wave of emotions, and though he _had_ been thinking about Ted, this one felt like the random ones.

 

He could almost see himself at 15 screaming at him to go back to Ted's room immediately because holy shit he's alive and you know where he is - but instead he makes his way back slowly.

 

Ted's awake and flipping though the channels of a wall mounted TV when Booster returns. He doesn't stop when Booster sits in the chair beside the bed, but he does glance his way. After a moment, Ted stops, turns the TV off and drops the remote on the bed.

 

"Are you disappointed that it's me?" Booster asked him.

 

"No."

 

He spoke so definitively that, even with the lack of emotion in his voice, Booster believed him.

 

"When I was a teenager I thought you had died. I got my mark the night I showed you the future - the links were already there in your head. My brain found someone linked up to me, your brain couldn't tell the difference - all the pathways were there, built by years of tweaking by fully formed brains in people who knew each other better than themselves.  It all came from nowhere and then disappeared. I felt it again here, in this time, but for those years in between I just wanted," Booster paused so he wouldn't choke up. "I just wanted to."

 

He couldn't get the words out. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Ted's face shift, from a blank, slightly unfocused glance to the one Ted had when listening to him talk about his favorite teams or after the fourth inappropriate interjection at League meetings.

 

"I love you," Ted whispered.

 

Michael stopped trying to talk and instead moved to the edge of the bed and pulled Ted close to him.  They'd been this close before, but one of them would always let go after a moment.  Neither ever wanted to let go again.


	6. Epilogue

"Okay, so the way I see it, we could either keep this under wraps for two years and split the pot between just us, or just pretend to get together in eight months if Guy agrees to split it three ways. Cause if he doesn't pay up, we could always tell them the truth about when we got together and the money reverts back to Bea."

 

"Since Batman's _technically_ in on this, we should probably keep the time period for elaborate lies as short as possible even though I doubt he's going to care about this - though on the other hand I don't trust Guy to not double cross us."

 

"Uh, what is this?"

 

Booster and Ted quickly turned around to see that Jaime had walked into the garage.

 

"We're maximizing profits Jaime, what does it look like we're doing?"

 

"It looks like you're sitting shirtless in Booster Gold's lap, but what do I know?"

 

Ted seemed to have forgotten his shirt had gone missing - he quickly grabbed it from floor and threw it back on "I don't like the chairs in here."

 

"I don’t want to see this. This is sexual harassment, just saying."

 

"You can't waltz into people's personal residences unannounced and say _they_ sexually harassed _you_!"

 

"We have so much dirt on Guy though," Booster pointed out, changing the subject. "Just releasing some of it would be worth the money."

 

"Wait a second-" Jaime interrupted. "Which betting pool is this?"

 

"The JLI's _'When are Booster and Beetle Going to Fuck Already?'_ pool. We were going to just pretend to have sex two years from now or three years from now when our years came up and split the winnings, but now we have to alter that plan a little."

 

"Would _never_ have guessed you needed to change that plan. I can't believe they let you two enter money into a bet about your own sex lives."

 

"Which is why we're the businessmen and you're the protégé," Ted told him.

 

"You're never going to be able hide this."

 

"He's right," Booster agreed.

 

"Okay, new plan - I make the 4 weeks look like an 8 on the hospital discharge papers where it says when I'm allowed to have sex, Jaime tells Batman he wants in on the bet and that his date is a month from now, Jaime gives us the money and we pay him double what the pot is through a Kord inc. tax-deductible bonus for his troubles."

 

"Well seeing as I'd come out with more money than you, I'm down," Jaime told him.

 

"Great! Just give Batman five dollars, he's holding the money."

 

Jaime's eyes narrow.  "Five dollars? How many people are in on this?"

 

"I think around ten."

 

"Wait, this is over FIFTY DOLLARS?"

 

"I think you meant to say 'Forty dollars more than we had when we started'," Booster said _very_ seriously.

 

"I thought it was at least five hundred! You'd go through two years of keeping secrets from your best friends for _fifty dollars?_ "

 

"So you're not going to give Batman the money?" Ted asked.

 

"I mean no, a $100 bonus after paying $5 is still $95 more than I would've had."

 

"Great, that's your lesson for today," Ted crumpled up the brainstorming paper and threw it in the waste basket.  "I'm assuming you didn't just come her to hang out?"

 

"My mom made these gross whole grain no sugar banana muffins for you. And more Get Well cards from the office," Jaime put a folder and a Tupperware of lumpy muffins on the counter.

 

"Great, I'll be in again next week."

 

Jaime went through his list of everything he needed to do this week deliberately to make sure he had no reason to come back down here. He waved goodbye and left.

 

_"I don't like the chairs in here."_

 

"Shut up."

 

"I can't believe you said 'I don't like the chairs -"

 

Ted had found a way to make Booster stop talking. Before either of them knew it, their shirts had come back off and Ted had begun working on Booster's pants as well. After a few moments though, Ted's hands fumbled and slowed. Booster could almost feel the energy shedding off him in waves.  He guided him on the floor, kissed him once more, and laid next to Ted on his stomach. Ted wouldn’t admit it, and Booster never said anything, but he was still exhausted.

 

"Teddy, let's cut Jamie out, pretend disappear in opposite parts of the globe, spend two years with just each other in the Bahamas, then pretend we haven't seen each other in years, pretend to get together then and collect the money."

 

"Don't say stuff like that, I'll take you up on it."

 

"You think I'm joking?"

 

Ted's hands wandered to their mark on Booster's back. "Hey Mikey?" He whispered.  "If I die next time -"

 

"Not going to happen."

 

"Okay, but if it does - "

 

"No, I mean it's _not going to happen._ I checked eighty years after you were born and we're both still alive."

 

"I -  you're serious?"

 

"Serious as - serious as can be."

 

Ted knew what Booster had meant to say and laughed.  He wasn't going to die before he was forty.  

 

“Do I win a Nobel Prize in physics?”  


“I didn’t check.”

 

“I’ll ask Skeets.”

 

“He won’t know, someone’s gone back through and planted falsified documents surrounding you since you were a kid – not me, I’m not sure who’s been doing it.  It’s all jumbled up. By my time three of your biographies claims you moonlighted as a pornstar named Steven Banger.”

 

“Maybe I am Steven Banger.”

 

“We talked, for a little bit,” Booster told him after a minute. “You said things weren’t always good, but we were together at least.”

“Good. Wouldn’t want things to get too boring.”

 

“I tried to ask about more – but you said it was our future. ‘Michael,’ you told me ‘It’s whatever the two of you want it to be.’ So I think that means we’ll be happy.”

 

“I know I’ll be happy,” Ted told him.  “I’ll be with you.”


End file.
